CHAPTER XI.
The Story of Angola and the "Cocoa Islands."
The Portuguese Dependencies in West Africa comprise Angola, the islands of San Thomé and Principe, and the enclave of Kabinda north of the Congo. They cover some 480,000 square miles. They represent the crumbling relics of an ancient splendour identified with an inhuman traffic. The cancer of the slave trade gnawed at the vitals of this territory so long that it has never recovered. Indeed, until a few years ago, the slave trade persisted although appropriately garbed in the raiments of modern hypocrisy. The earliest Portuguese settlement in Angola dates back to the close of the 15th Century. In 1600 the Governor of Angola secured the "Assiento" contract (see Chapter III.) for the supply of slaves to the Spanish West Indies. About the middle of that century the Portuguese authorities began raiding for slaves in the interests of the sugar planters of Brazil. A more intensive demand for slaves arose in Brazil early in the 18th Century with the discovery of gold and diamonds. Slave hunts in Angola kept pace with this demand and led to great depopulation, the area of operations steadily increasing with the years. Although Portugal officially abolished the slave trade south of the Equator in 1830, enormous numbers of slaves continued to be transported to the Brazils by Portuguese slavers up to 1850–60, these "illegal" activities being connived at by the Portuguese officials in Angola and Brazil respectively. From that date onward the increasing energy of British and French cruiser squadrons put an end to the cross-Atlantic traffic. But it was fated that Angola should continue to be drained of its life-blood for many years to come. Slavery of the
old-fashioned kind, the raiding, kidnapping and purchase of human beings for plantations under white overseers, did not die out with the legal abolition of the trade. It is very doubtful if it is wholly dead in Angola to-day. A few years before the Great War it would have been accurate to state of Angola that its native peoples were in the same hapless condition as they used to be in other
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